


laughs, like god

by clytemnestras



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Anachronistic, Dee-Centric, F/M, Found Families, Multi, Mythology References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-24
Updated: 2016-05-24
Packaged: 2018-06-10 11:44:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,521
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6955144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/clytemnestras
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dee is her brother’s sister, but she’s also her own person. Sometimes that means being a long line of intersection. Sometimes it means she's the only thing that keeps them all from killing themselves. </p><p> </p><p>(Dee, between childhood and age forty; on power, godhood, family and drinking games)</p>
            </blockquote>





	laughs, like god

**Author's Note:**

> this fic is most likely 3k longer than it needs to be. I got carried away. I don't even know.
> 
> also: Mac is still absolutely not straight here.

Dennis has his hand on her hip and his face close enough hers that she can feel how warm his breath is and this is the bi-weekly norm for them, whispers in confidence and clammy-handed grips. As a rule, he will fuck up on a stupid scam, she will yell and he will turn on her like a dog because the norm is cyclical and Dee will always, always, be cut on his words. Her ribs are flint-sharp by now, all cut up from her own heart and the things she hides there - his words are a pinprick, in the end.

The world of Dee Reynolds is simple: sometimes when slapstick and misery bang over a hellfire little girls are born and they keep picking the short straw until it kills them.

Dennis’s smile is easy and nasty. Where they’re huddled together behind the bar his eyes are dark in the way that promises trouble, and she’s smiling back, eyes narrowed and her veins filled with more liquor than blood. They have night-lit faces, shadowy things, horrible things. The truth slices through her ribs and hits her heart hard in the ass; when it’s _this_ , when it’s _them_ , she will always pull the knife out and come back to him. That’s why they win. Why they will _always_ win.

Charlie laughs somewhere behind them and cuts through the regular thrum of Mac’s voice, an overcomplicated plan of failure punctuated with a slap and Dennis’s hand tightens on her hip. It’s level three, Dee’s up next and nobody is going to hurt her more than she can hurt herself. They both pick up their glasses without the game demanding it and take a long drink.

“Babygirl, grab the fire extinguisher, those assholes are gonna burn.”

 

*

 

Anyone will tell you: Dee is a stupid slut, and she knows crack, sack and jack-shit about anything; bastardised college education be damned. She think’s she’s god’s gift to refined society with nothing to back it up.

The truth is, once something really burrows under her skin, she’ll sink her teeth in and gnaw until something better comes along. Every short lived obsession is a victim of circumstance.

So is every guy.

 

*

 

When Dee is seventeen the school hallways stretch like an Escher painting, and Adriano Calvanese knocks her over so hard in the hallway that on impact with the floor her brace shatters and so does one of her bottom teeth, blood dripping from her ruined mouth.

Adriano looks at her, his Superman jaw tight and his eyes a little sad. “Christ, you really are a monster”, he says, then laughs and kicks off the crowd like a goddamn snare drum. “Gaptooth alert," He yells, "Carrie coming through!”

She runs. Cupping her hands around her chin as she sobs, Dee runs past the dicksmack loser _assholes_ taunting her all down the corridor and with the blurry sheen of tears over her eyes she doesn’t see her downfall in front of her until she’s tripping straight over Dennis’s pronouncedly outstretched foot.

It’s a slow motion kind of fall. World falls, body falls, a gravity shift with her chin skidding to his feet, something that twists her twin into the image of her insecurity, every speck of self-loathing right there in his eyes. “Dee, you goddamn harpy”, he says, and steps right over her.

Scrambling up into the bathroom is easy after that, even with Charlie wandering in after her, holding back her hair when she vomits and offering her some peanuts he found in the gutter on the walk to school. He even gives Dee her tooth back when she tells him he can’t keep it. Not even for his collection of nicknacks.

Sleeping that night is a delusion. Her mother’s face when she uncurls her _‘fucking man-hands Deandra, were you spawned of the devil?’_ around the tooth shocks the tiredness out of her. So she stays up, first scouring their filthy-old mythology books for _harpy_ and then for anything similarly vile. Just something easy to throw at Dennis over breakfast.

This is where she discovers Apollo is the god not only of the Sun, but also of plague and disease. This is where she discovers the first Golden God had a sister - a twin - who did just as much damage as him.

Ignoring the virgin part is simple enough, she doesn’t plan on that lasting long.

The snapped backbrace knocks her treatment back a month but these things can't be helped.

 

*

 

Sometimes it feels as though Dee is stuck in some eternal fight with the world for her own good fortune, clinging to it with her nails when it comes and knowing it will be snatched back.  

When fortune favours her, Dennis always comes back to her, pathetic and small, ravenous for her attention.

This, he says later, or before, in her apartment one night when Mac’s passed out and they’re still drinking, this is the God in them. When she is in control the blood they share pulls him in, back, just as hungry for the spotlight.

“Is that why I’m always an ass to you when it happens?” _No,_ she thinks, she knows, _that’s because I hate you. Because you always treat me like shit._

He smiles and rests a hand on her shoulder. “Exactly, Dee, exactly. And it’s why I have to be such a dick to you every day. It’s the natural order of things.”

He stands and spins in the small kitchen, fishing out another bottle of whiskey from under the sink and sloshing it into their glasses.

He’s drunk. Smiley, tactile drunk and his eyes are slitted when raises his glass to hers. “To functional immortality”, he says, and slams it back.

“You’re a pretentious piece of shit, Dennis.” Tipping her head back and downing the whiskey is easy. It always has been.

“And you’re a world-class slut, what else is new, Dee?” He stretches out over the table and slips off, landing with his head in her lap. “‘m very drunk.”

Dee flicks him between the eyes and he yowls but doesn’t sit up. “You really are.” She flicks him again and pours herself another drink.

“Gimme?” He pouts, shifting on her lap and it’s weird how the warmth from him shifts when he does, how sudden the cold is when he moves away.

“Get your own damn drink, turkey.” She brings the glass to her lips and when she does Dennis’s hand flies up and knocks the glass so the whiskey sloshes all over them both. He’s laughing too hard to realise his shirt’s soaked through, staining as it dries.

She drops the glass onto the table and grabs him by the shoulders. “You _asshole.” But this is good,_ she thinks. _This is us, just us, and it’s good._ Alone, the playing field is equal, and they’re awful and similar and his attention is taken captive by her.

“Whoops?” He smiles up at her, eyes hardly staying open. Her fight falters slightly, realising how sloppy her own movements are. Still, she shoves him onto the floor and he catches her shoulder, dragging her down with him. Her knees take the damage and bruises will blossom there in the morning but she’s drunk-numb and nothing hurts; nothing, nothing, nothing. He’s still laughing hysterically, clawing at the carpet as he crawls away from Dee and they fall asleep collapsed there, heaped together.

 

Dee dreams that night that she’s on the plane steps on her way to Hollywood, to her future, successful and glorious for that brief second before the world righted itself. A stranger version of the world, where the sky is peachy and the whole expanse of her skin is cold and Dennis is on his knees below her; Dee is electric and perfect.

 _I love you,_ he says, and the world shakes and shifts.

 _It’s me,_ he says, _it’s always been me for you,_ and Dee’s feet are firmly on the ground and Dennis’s knees are level with her feet and the world is still small, as small as her, as small as the backroom in Paddy’s but warm and filled with steam or smoke.

 _Take me with you,_ he says, holding on to her legs, hugging her close, his point of touch the only part of her solid in the liminal space.

 _Oh,_ she says and he clings tighter, tighter, and breathes her in. He looks up at her, fingers inching up her jeans, looping into the waist of her pants and underwear in one and he’s still staring, staring, all the way up at her. Asking, but not asking, ready to lean in.

When she wakes up Dennis is lying on top of her, drooling onto her stomach. She feels dizzy, and _sick_ , and when she moves the whiskey in her guts sloshes around. She knees Dennis in the face. “Wake up, dickhead, get off of me.”

He makes a sound and rolls over, pulling her sweater over himself like a blanket and even though it feels gross and terrifying to stay on the floor with nothing but the taste of her own stale breath for company, Dee curls up and falls back asleep.

 

*

 

There’s dangerous power in a name. That’s another thing she learns from the mythology books. If someone has your name then they have power over you, and if they don’t then nothing can touch you.

If you’re more than mortal, anyway.

And she is, they are.

Whilst school was horrible, more people knew her nickname than her real one; as much a legend as a monster. It may have fucked her self esteem for good but it gave her aspirations, too. The epithet still clings to the school walls, a catch on her own history.

Dennis still calls himself a God, Golden God, enough that he thinks it makes him powerful. It’s fucking telling that _he_ named himself; he’s saying _no one has power over myself but me._

Dee killing her name is a different kind of power. It’s saying, _from the ashes, I rise. Bitch._

 

*

 

On prom night, when she’s cried herself out, Dee sneaks out of her bedroom window in the sluttiest dress she could find in her mother’s wardrobe and sits in the school parking lot with a bottle of gin, waiting for the gang to stumble out. She knows nobody, barring Cricket, or maybe Brad Fisher, is gonna want to bang a chick in a backbrace, but Charlie and most likely Mac will sit and get shitfaced with her until the sun comes up, and pretty soon they’ll have a whole summer (a whole _rest of their goddamn lives_ ) to make it a habit. The dress isn’t for looking hot, just a way to prove to her bitch of a mother that if Dee’s fat then her mother must be a cow if her tightest dress can fit over all the rounded plastic and metal. It’s a satisfaction thing.

A half hour alone on the concrete is promptly forgotten when Charlie vaults through the doors, screaming. He’s followed by Mac, who has a significant limp, then by Dennis, who has a black eye and finally by a group of jocks and their dates.

Mac grins when he sees her, launches himself into her arms. “Dee, thank God.” He twists, yanks her arm and spins her in front of himself; “I can use you as a shield!”

“Dammit Mac get the fuck off of me.” She smacks his hands away and then Dennis is there, hitting him too.

“Yes Mac, get off of her.” He smiles at her. “She’s my sister, she should be shielding me.”

Dee nails them both in the stomach - an elbow for Dennis, a fist for Mac - and Charlie makes no grabs for her. “What the hell is going on here?”

Charlie closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “Dennis accused Tim of sleeping with his date so Mac tried to roundhouse kick him and hit Adriano instead. Adriano looked _pissed off_ and rounded up a bunch of friends and then we were running. There was some screaming, mostly from me, and now we need you to save us, Dee, please save us.”

“What the crap am I supposed to do?”  She picks up the bottle of gin and feels the weight of it in her hands and she knows she’s gonna be screwing herself over for these idiots long into the future. “Get in the car boys, and get ready to drive.”

She tosses the bottle between her hands for while, picking up some confidence, some rage in lieu of momentum. Dee backs up against the front passenger seat, hurls the bottle at the oncoming mob - a daydream says she nails Adriano in his pretty goddamn face, because disfigurement is sure fucking hilarious when it isn’t happening to you - then scrambles into the car barely in time for Dennis to slam it into reverse.

He socks her lightly on the arm and smiles at her. “Everyone back to our house to get shitfaced on my Dad’s illegal spirits?”

“Fuck yeah.”

It’s later, much later, when Charlie is passed out sideways on Dennis’s bed, Dennis thrown on top of him, drooling spit in a puddle along Charlie’s collarbone when Dee realises Mac has his hand on her leg.

“The fuck ‘re you doin’?” Her head rolls onto his shoulder, floppy and tired and gloriously drunk. It’s 2am, so they’ve been drinking for maybe four hours and her body feels like it, with the backbrace long discarded, every little movement molasses slow.

“That’s ... _that_ is the ugliest damn dress I think I’ve ever seen.” His hand slides further up, pulling the fabric along her thigh. His hands are rough and warm, eyes heavy.

“Mac”, she says, and there’s nothing she can follow it with.

He shakes his head, jostling her where they’re curled together. “Dennis said it made you look pre-pretty or less like a hag or.. something. And I told him he was a gross perv.” He sighs. “I slept with his prom date, Dee, but,” he puts his finger on her mouth, dragging at her lower lip. “ _Shhhh,_ you can’t tell him.”

“Why’d you do it?” She’s very still, too afraid to move in a way that jolts him, that pushes him away or eggs him on. Her body is a neutral space.

“I just. Dunno. He was off looking for attention when I was right there, when I had nothing else to do but he wanted someone who fucking mattered.” He sniffs and drains the dregs of the so-called vintage beer they found under Frank’s bed. “And this girl right, she was looking for him but she was touching me and he wasn't there and he didn't care about either of us so why wouldn't I do it, Dee? Why wouldn't I look him in the eye after fucking his girlfriend when he was off doing... whatever.”

“Mac”, she says again, turning her face into his neck. It feels strange, a drifting, dizzying thing when she realises that for the first time perhaps ever, she has the power. “Why have you never hit on me? Is it because you’re afraid of what Dennis might do to you?”

Mac looks confused. “I don’t know why. You’re.. You.” He grimaces. “And I guess, whenever I said anything about you that wasn’t y’know hateful and shitty and gross, Dennis would get weird. Scar-Scary-ass weird. He once said if I touched you he’d  - _eviser - evisk?_  - kill me and shit to death with some scissors and feed the bits to Poppins.” He shifts his face and presses it into her hair. “You’re a lot like each other, you know. Same eyes. Same… mm, _warmth._ ” His hands curve around her hip, pulling her closer. He’s sloppy drunk, hands more like paws, but all of his - crazy stupid wonderful - attention is on her.

“Do you want me?” She asks, quiet suddenly, an exhalation against his neck.

He doesn’t say anything, but when she stands up to move back to her room, he slides their hands together, and follows her.

“It’s a secret,” she says, pushing him back onto the bed.

Mac nods. “Like the prom thing. Secret. Sh.” He pulls her down onto his lap and just kisses her, no pulled faces or sudden panic. He kisses her, and she kisses him back, too far gone to care.

They don’t - that’s a lie. They have intent, and they do enough for it to matter. Her mouth is bruised and her stomach is all peppered with marks and she falls asleep in nothing but a bra and his body blanketing hers, hands wrapped warmly around her waist. His mouth is warm along her throat, as warm as it was when it spread her open and she shifts for a long time against his still body, still throbbing and tacky inside.

It’s not like she really expected him to be there in the morning anyway.

 

*

 

“Never have I ever kissed a dude.” Charlie slurs, knocking his glass over on the bar. It’s late-late, even for them, but 3am arrived and none of them are fit to walk home in this state but they’re too buzzed to want to do anything but drink on. They’re valiant, at least. Everyone’s stripped down to vests, soft and warm with the alcohol and they’re curled around one corner of the bar closer than usual, talking as softly as they’re ever likely to get.

“This is a card game Charlie, not never have I ever.” Dee kicks at his feet under the bar.

Mac’s eyebrows knit together. “Wait, what are we playing?”

Dennis groans and smacks the table. His arms are too pale, veins jumping out. He looks like he’s been skipping meals again, but Dee won’t mention it if he doesn’t. He rolls his head back, stretching his neck out and it makes a loud _crack_ sound that snaps through the hush. “Goddammit we’re playing poker, guys, it’s the only thing that’s not Chardee McDennis we all know how to play.”

“I thought we was playin’ bullshit.” Frank leans over the bar and runs the beer tap directly into his open mouth.

“What the fresh hell is that?”

Dee and Dennis look at each other and grimace. “It’s go fish but angrier, with more lying, and usually more alcohol.”

“Go fish is for pussies, man, no way.” Mac belches and Charlie high fives him. Dee would gladly let the ground consume her barstool and deliver her to any alternate hell.

“You fucking savages”, Dennis sighs and takes a sip of his beer. Dee does the same.

“Jesus, fine, never have I ever had sex in the bar.” She’s unsurprised to see everyone but Charlie take a drink.

Mac nudges her with his elbow, “hey what about -”

“Nope”, she cuts him off, “back alley doesn’t count.”

Dennis makes a face. “Tell me you did it in a car.”

“I’m not telling you a goddamn thing about it, pervert. Your turn, Mac.”

“Fine”, he says, smiling all smug. “Never have I ever fucked anyone in the gang”, he says, then takes a long drink.

She screws her eyes shut. “You fucking idiot.”

Dennis leaps up with a roar. _“What?”_

Mac baulks and ducks off of his stool, cowering between Charlie and the bar. “Shit, man. It was a long time ago. It was... An accident?”

“Who’d you fuck, man?” Charlie says, smiling sloppily. He’s been doing glue between drinks, and there’s a small dribble of blood on the edge of his left nostril. It’s impressive, almost, that he’s upright.

“Me, Charlie, he fucked me,” Dee says, and covers her face with her hands. She smells like sweat and alcohol and _boy_ and all of it is repulsive.

“And why on earth would you let him do that? Him I expect this from, but _you_ Dee? I thought you - no that’s a lie, I knew you had no standards, but _Mac?_ ” Dennis has his hands on her wrists, framing her face where it’s hidden, and she peeks between her fingers. His face is horribly red, eyes almost black, but he’s staring through her, like she’s not the one he wants to bludgeon. His touch on her hands is gentle, shaking with restraint when he eases them away from her face. He asks, very seriously,“did he blackmail you?”

“What, no!” Mac yells and Dennis’s nostrils flare.

“Shut the fuck up man.” He looks up and laughs. It feels like a weapon. “I will kill you, I will kill you and roll your skin into cigarettes then give them to your mom to smoke.” Dennis laughs again and looks down at her.

Dee moves her hands, slowly and Dennis leans in too close. He smells the same as her, gross but familiar, and it calms the way her guts are twisting together. “Don’t kill him, Den. It was forever ago. I was stupid and he was… Mac.”

“You guys,” Mac says, and they move as one to glare at him. “Frank’s passed out.”

“That sounds like a good idea, actually”, Dee says, and Dennis is still holding onto her, still has too much exposed skin resting alongside hers. It’s all decidedly un-sibling-like. And though she hates it, it’s startlingly easy, too, to sit there and let it happen. Her face burns a soft pink in the panic, too light to notice, she hopes, but it’s hard to say when Dennis is _right there._ “In the morning”, she says to him in the most gentle - no, not gentle, _calm_ \- voice she can muster, “we can talk then. Let’s just crash.”

“You made a vow, you piece of shit, to never touch my sister, she’s vulgar and gross and _off fucking limits_.” He sneers at Mac for a moment before settling his gaze on her again. “I’m not letting him near you.” His face is still red and everything is awful and they’re way too fucking drunk for this to be made sense of.

“Ew, gross dude, I would not.”

“Mac, shut the fuck up.” Dee pushes Dennis away softly. “I’m getting my coat and I’m sleeping in the booth over there.”

“Neat,” Charlie says, drooling on himself. “I’ll come with you.”

Dennis has white knuckles and clenched teeth but says nothing, and Dee can’t make herself rebuff Charlie, as though the room is full of gas and a wrong sharp word could blow them all apart.

He slinks along behind her and curls up around her, arm a weight on her waist and Dee can feel Dennis seething on the other side of the bar long into the morning, not finding sleep until the sun comes up.

 

*

 

Charlie has told Dee he loves her three times, each punctuated with a kiss that lasts too long and leaves them both tingly and something else unexplainable that they end up burying the second it passes. It starts when they’re nineteen, almost twenty and she gets the backbrace off. He comes to their house that evening, throwing rocks at her window until Frank tells him to _get in or duck,_ pointing a shotgun from the first floor window. Charlie chooses to stumble inside.

It’s almost to-the-day the anniversary of the loss of his virginity, a month after Dee got her first warning letter from Penn and the first time they’ve been alone with each other since last summer when Dennis and Mac would screw them over for one girl or another and Dee would let Charlie play on the mini grand piano whilst she wrote out character outlines for her drama group.

Dee’s half dressed when he comes into her room, sweatpants slouchy and low on her hips, her torso bare but for the fancy bra she bought for the date that stood her up three nights before. She’s only meaning to look at how her body looks now, how the fabric really sits against her pale skin when there’s no metal or plastic entrapments. The mirror shows her as something tall and slim and unknowable and for the first time since childhood she wants to believe in what she sees.

“Wow”, Charlie says, and Dee screams. “Shit, oh no, Dee, it’s just me! Oh man.” He shuts the door behind himself and slides up to her, hands fluttering at her sides. “Shh, Dee, oh God.”

“Charlie what the fuck?” He looks at her with these big eyes, pupils blown and his lips wet and too-bitten and she sighs, slightly pleased. “Sit down, then, dammit.”

He grins and goes to touch her waist but she pulls back just smooth enough to dodge him, just the small whip of air where his hand misses her skin. “So, no brace, hell yeah.”

Dee’s arms are cold and she shivers when she crosses them to cover herself. “Yep”, she says, and lets a small silence settle between them where she’s too shy to sit beside him, too proud to feel around for something to pull on.

“Well you look. Ah. Great.” He’s not actually looking at her, rather he’s tapping something out on his thighs like he does, always with music spilling out of him.

It, suddenly (and unusually), is the most annoying thing in the world.

“Why are you here, Charlie?” Her chest is puffed out to feign indignance but even she can see it just emphasises her rack. It's a task to not just smile to herself.

He looks at her, then, like he’s utterly lost. “Mac’s visiting his dad and Dennis is out with some chick… Where else would I be?”

He lays back on her bed and with nothing better to do she follows him down, still half naked, but comfortable with it in a new, foreign way. “You can stay,” she mouths, not sure if he can hear her but not worried about him leaving, either.

“How’s college?” He asks and she wants to cry.

“My roommate is such a bitch, Charlie. I might just snap and shave her head in the night or set the bed on fire.” Lying the way they are leaves warmth leaching from his body into hers, and she lets herself be drawn into it, not touching, but. “And it's not like Dennis has time for me now.” She adds it in like an afterthought, like it doesn't sicken her now that his delusions of grandeur have blossomed into reality and she is still as she has always been.

“Don't you have any friends?” She's not sure why he's whispering. Maybe she started it. Maybe he doesn't want to disturb the air beyond them.

“Charlie, don't”, she says, and lets it drop between them like a stone.

He turns so hes looking right at her, faces almost touching but not. His nose looks kind of funny in the lamplight, the hair along his jaw patchy like it's been since he was fifteen and like she can't imagine him growing out of. “Fuck college”, he says. “Fuck those assholes. You've got the gang, Dee. You've got Dennis, even when he's being a huge manwhore. You've got me!”

The way he smiles then just startles a reciprocal one out of her. It's weird, gross, Charlie magic. Very unsettling.

“We love you, Dee.” He looks at her very carefully. “ _I_ love you.”

He stops for a second, glancing at the gap between their bodies and the wealth of space living there. His hand barely seems to move but manages to fall against her bare waist. Slowly, his fingers slide up her skin and he leans oh so slightly forward, meeting the resistance of her hand as he does.

“Woah, Charlie.” She holds her hand against his forearm, not dealing out much pressure at all. He could push her aside without a thought. He doesn’t.

“Right, yeah. That was weird, huh?” He laughs and it's a fake, uncanny thing. “Don't know what came over me.” He sits up and pushes himself off the bed, moving to stand as far from her in the small room as he can without leaving it entirely.

She’s been changing her space a lot, lately. Reinvention is totally what you’re meant to do in college. It’s easy to pull herself apart and reassemble it all wrong, full of _things_ and _stuff_ that will never really belong to her.

Charlie looks more at home in this flea-market of a room than she ever will.

He pokes an elephant-shaped incense burner she bought with a self-described _witch bitch_ last semester, the trunk pointing towards him with the thin little matchstick base still sticking from it. “This smells gross, dude, what the hell is it?” He leans in to smell it closer and knocks it off the dresser, spilling week-old ash all over her carpet.

“Dammit, Charlie!” She says, and a horrible little voice in her head makes it sound something like _I love you too._

She gets up and walks across the room very carefully stopping when she gets close enough to smell the faintly sweet, garbage smell of him.

“This will never happen again”, she tells him, tipping his face up towards hers and kissing him much too long for them to laugh it off.

She makes herself laugh anyway.

 

*

 

They don't fuck.

Her and Charlie, the night they skip the def poetry night because they’ve stumbled into each other's warm body and open mouth, they don't fuck.

Charlie tastes like candy corn and beer and gasoline and smells like bleach over trash, which is better than she ever expected of him. He breathes out against her mouth like this has been the inevitable consequence of every time they’ve been gentle. “Fuck, Dee.”

“I know,” she says, and bridges the gap.

His fingers paw at her in the most ungainly way, somehow less sure and more sure than any other guy has been with her. He may not know what he’s doing but he’s sure of the moment. He presses his fingers deep into the hollows of her hips and presses himself to her, breathing hotly against the thin skin on her throat and despite their clothes still clinging to them, all sweaty and close, she feels horribly exposed.

His hips line up close with hers, his thigh pressed between her legs all tight against her and a noise falls from her throat like a puff of air and it’s not good but it’s good enough for now, she guesses. His hands move from her hips to mould against her breasts like he just can’t fucking believe he can touch there and he’s grinning when she catches flashes of his face. Everything is ridiculous and sweaty and gross and she grinds down hard against his leg, wanting and straining for something worth the energy.

They keep moving like that together, arythmically and desperate until he presses himself way too hard against her, rutting faster, frantic. Charlie grinds in tight circles for two, three seconds and collapses down, warmth seeping through his pants.

She sighs and pushes him off, one shaky hand slipping under her jeans, Charlie leaning over her shoulder, bright eyes trained on her the whole time. Studying. Fascinated. She speeds up, wanting this to be over, wanting her cheeks to flush back to pale.

After, when they're sweaty and still dressed and he’s all around her still - more than the warm press of him along her spine - Charlie tells her for the third time that he loves her. He cups her chin with his hand and turns her head to meet his mouth. He puts enough sadness into the kiss to make her weightless and solid between breaths.

“If things were…” He says, running his fingers through her hair in long movements. “If things were…” _different_ , she finishes in her head, not certain it’s what he means but sure it's what she wants from him. She’d hate for this to be right for either of them. But mostly herself.

She turns over and nods. “I know, Charlie.” She takes his hand and it feelings like sneaking around, like being in school pressing their palms together under the desk where nobody can see.

Dee isn't the waitress. She's a person, a horrible one made by an uncaring world and the innate sense to cause damage to any real or imagined threat. She isn't the idealised, rambling delusions of someone who puts safety in agony. She is, though, or she thinks she’d like to be something volatile but safe for Charlie to hold onto. She is something that over time when the world has shifted and changed again and left them with each other, will probably start to destroy him.

So Dee is a lot of things, but she’s not the Waitress. Charlie stays and keeps playing with her hair anyway.

 

*

 

Dee has no secrets that are hers, except for the ones that are. Like the friends she amassed after college for three months before Mac met them, Dennis fucked them and Charlie scarred them.

Like the tattoo on her ribcage she gets one day when she skips out on the bar and wants to ruin or perfect herself in some way.

It’s only something small, a black-line arrow shooting towards a crescent moon just under her left boob. She feels sixteen. She feels _awesome._ So good that she never goes in for work, just wanders the highstreet, picks up a new dress and settles in at Starbucks, sipping at a coffee and smiling at the barista until he slides her his number and kicks her out of the store.

 

*

 

Dee’s apartment is infested with hair gel and crumbs and feels nothing like the place she wanted for a home. Somehow these small migrations have become ingrained in her space until belonging to it has a new meaning. She hates that empty chip bags scattered across her carpet make a fitting metaphor for her body and the life twisted around it.

It’s been a week, maybe two, since Mac slipped up and Dennis is fraying, still. It’s hardly easy to forget the fastest way to break Dennis is through his family. Through his women. Mac seems to take this as a slight against him - isn’t he family too? Doesn’t he mean _more_ than girls?

They don’t speak. Dee is tired, and really fucking bored.

Dennis won’t talk to Mac without devolving into snarls, the feline way their mother taught them. When the twins walk into a room together, Mac slips soundlessly into the bathroom and stays there for hours and fucking hours. Somehow, despite it being her and her body and her home, she gets no say in this.

Somehow, Charlie is exempt from this.

Somehow, Charlie has kept his mouth shut.

Somehow, the bar opens in the morning and closes the next as usual, again and again.

She breaks down the bathroom door one night when Dennis doesn't come home and she's pissed off and lonely. 

Mac looks up at her half-scared and begrudgingly impressed. "You think you're so damn strong, Dee?" He says, in place of hello or sorry. "Wanna wrestle?" 

A lot of retorts die on her tongue. Dee is her brother’s sister, but she’s also her own person. Sometimes that means being a long line of intersection. Sometimes it means she's the only thing that keeps them all from killing themselves. "Sure thing, asshole. If I kick your ass, you can buy me a new door."

 

*

 

When they were kids, both Dee and Dennis would have these dreams, awful, spine-melting things; troll-like creatures who hunted the streets with bows and knives and witchy women with crow’s beaks for mouths that could tear the skin straight from a body. The first time they watched Snow White together, neither slept for a week.

When those dreams reared back up - when their mother ‘made an example’ of the latest poolboy or their father threw their toys onto the barbecue to get it going again - they would both climb underneath Dee’s bed, dragging out pillows and sheets to form their own stronghold.

They would sleep there, huddled together for protection against malevolence, and in the morning they would stick their tongues out at one another and deny any closeness.

The night Mac’s dad was arrested the first time, all of them sixteen and awkward, Dee pulled the duvet off her bed and tied it between her headboard and window frame, shoving the mattress on the floor and covering it with pillows. They all traded a bottle of vodka between them, grimacing at the taste but not really giving a shit and Mac had ended up pressed between Dennis and Charlie on the floor, not forgetting but able to not think for a night. Dee took a picture of them like that on her floor, close and comforting and like a makeshift family portrait. It’s hard to say what happened to it. Lost with the house, probably.

One night Dennis comes into her room, clearly drunk and strung out and he pulls the duvet straight off of her and lays it on the floor like a picnic blanket.

“What the fuck, jackass?” She fumbles around for the lamp on the bedside table and just to be a bitch, shines it straight in his eyes.

Shrugging, he sits on the duvet, pulling a big decorative cushion off the end of her bed so he can rest his arms and head on it. “Get down here, Dee.” He rolls onto his back. “Doesn’t work if you’re not helping protect it.”

“Dammit, Dennis. I’m gonna kill you tomorrow. I’ll cut you with a breadknife, don’t think I won’t.” Still, she flops down off the bed and onto the duvet, dragging a blanket and pillow with her. “What the fuck is up, Den?”

He laughs nastily and pulls her down hard so she’s sprawled out beside him. “What’s wrong? Everything is _fucked,_ Dee. Mac’s too afraid to speak to me, Charlie is Charlie, you’re avoiding everyone, and the fact is I’m a forty year old asshole with no real home, a rapidly decreasing wealth of sexual prowess, and nothing but a critically savaged bar to my name.”

“At least you’ve got your hair”, she says to shut him up, and he feels it protectively, teasing it between his fingers.

“When we were kids, this used to fix everything.” He pokes her in the arm. “Do the magic. Like you used to. Fix us, Dee.”

 

*

 

She pulls out the game pieces and the flags. The bar is empty but for them, scattered across different corners of the room. Dennis is behind the bar so Mac is hiding in the back, watching him through the door. Charlie is spread across several tables, cloth stapled to his socks and gloves as he wipes things down. Frank is screeching in Korean down the phone outside.

Dee is holding two barbie dolls, two malformed chunks of plastic and two flags. A long candle lighter is sticking from her front pocket.

“Alright bitches”, she says, face drawn like a deathmask, watching as Mac edges back into the room. “No more bullshit. Let’s settle this thing like Gods.”

  
Dennis smiles at her, long and slow. She smiles back.


End file.
